With the Coupon Industry Quickly Shifting to Digital, It’s Time to Cut Out the Middleman

It’s a familiar narrative of times: Industry fill-in-the-blank goes digital and someone loses out. Pick a field – retail, music, media – and you can find part of the old business construct squeezed out of the equation.

Yet in the multibillion coupon industry, which our company is leading in the shift to digital, the behind-the-scene players continue to charge consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands and retailers for services that, in a digital world, cost essentially nothing. The middlemen here are called coupon clearinghouses, and we’re getting to the point where it makes financial sense to cut them out of the digital coupon ecosystem, turning those unnecessary fees into working dollars.